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See drawing: I can’t seem to be able to manually change to the “To” variants – that is, override the decision of the label/arrow placement engine.

The circle in the attachment is a borderline example of when even just in this form I would more like it on the outside. If the drawing is crowded in that area, it would be even more useful to have it the other way around.

It would be nice to have the possibility to control the automatic Text orientation in Block attributes.Something what would work like the DIM restriction: I can read the text horizontal and/or from the right side of the drawing sheet.

Right now I have the feeling that the Text orientation is dependent on the tool what I even use.Different tools = different outcomes.

With the new block attribute feature available in QCAD 3.3, there’s little to be done in order to make QCAD a good environment for typesetting circuits and other diagrams. In particular, the only killer feature that lasts is support for connectors: orthogonal lines that connecting one endpoint to another creates a connection line; when the concerned entities are moved the connection line is re-arranged. I’d like to know whether commercial support for this feature is available.

It would be nice and helpful if we had the possibility to control the order of Attributes - shown in the property editor.I found a solution for myself with using numbers in the Attribute definition tag - but that isn’t really a nice solution.If I could hide my numbering ... everything would be fine for me ....

In the comnmand line, I can sucessfully enter for example the radius of a circle to draw (Space 100 Enter) but the command line does not accept a value for the distance when drawing parallel lines (l p space 100 enter → error).

If I move something and it went wrong I can easily undo the last move and start over without the need of a re-selection.If I copy something and it went wrong I can undo the last copy but I have to re-select everything again.

It would be nice to keep the once chosen selection in both “undo” situation!

Imported a spline-dxf from adobe illustrator. Converted the spline to polyline with explode command. Then no anchor points / vertex points / vertices were showing anymore. Simplified the polyline so that it had less than 1000 points. Vertices became visible.

I think some freeform objects need actually more than 1000 vertices. Also them need to be edited. Please increase the amount of vertices showing to biginteger

Merge Parallel Line(with distance), Concentric Arc(with distance), Concentric Circle(with distance) and Offset(Polyline) into one generic Offset with distance tool that if possible also works for ellipses and splines.

Do the same for the “through point” tools so that there also is just one Offset through point tool.

The Info Tool Polygonal Area is a helpful tool ... but I like to ask for additional options

Yes, the polygonal area makes absolute sense but many times you have just to check a square or rectangle area!

It would be nice and time (click) saving if we could use a “Strg Key” to limit the polygonal area to just a rectangle area.Two mouse clicks for a rectangle area and done

In addition to that it would be nice to have the possibility to count up or down a couple areas.E.g. I measure area 1 plus area 2 or area 1 minus area 2 ...Maybe just with an additional keystroke like + or -

The Midpoint Handles should be used to move Polyline Segments and lines. This would add easy to access stretch functionality.Combined with a shortcut(hold down shift or alt etc.) to fix the movement to be orthogonal to the line this would bring a lot of extra value.It would also be possible to to have another shortcut to easily insert nodes to Polylines (again hold shift or alt etc.)

As we all know - from time to time - it is a lot of work to prepare a part of a drawing for a hatch.To get rid of one of the basic task (cutting lines along the desired hatch boundary) it would be nice to have an add-on - or what ever - what would cut ALL intersection in a drawing (or just on one layer, or just based on a selection etc.) with just a mouse click. Then it would be much faster and easier to do the selection for the hatch boundaries.The user could decide to make it directly in his drawing or he like to duplicate the drawing to an extra layer where this function will be used ....

Clive mentioned on this:Maybe a tool like this could be an additional ‘Snap’ selection option - select all snap intersections or select snap intersections within a boundary! then as you suggest ‘cut’ at the intersection points.

It would be nice to have an additional Coordinate tool for isometric constructions.

If I’m working on an isometric drawing I have to design my things with x, y, z coordinates.Y is, of course not a problem but for x and z I have most off the time to work with construction lines for move, copy, locate etc.With an isometric coordinate snap tool what will follow the 30° angles for x and z we could save a lot of construction lines

This would be a modification tool. Parts are selected, a toolpath is generated, and a dialog pops up to allow putting the tool path into an existing layer, a new layer, or replace all drawings in an existing layer.

This is how the toolpath is generated:

We iterate through all elements and explode everything but text into line segments. Then we connect the line segments into chains wherever the line endpoints are less than some tolerance away from each other. The chains can be very chaotic, but at least we have separate entities for now.

For every chain, we need to find the largest complete loop. A good drawing would only contain non-overlapping loops, but we can’t expect that. Everything that is not on this loop can not be defined as a part or as a hole, so we will merely create a tool path segment that is equivalent to the line segment. Every segment that *IS* on a loop is either an outside edge (part outline), or an inside edge (hole outline), (or overlapping, in which case it is neither, and we have an operator problem).

In a perfect world, we need to find exactly which shape is inside which other shape, and then create alternating tool offsets from the outmost loop (part edge) to the second outmost (hole), to the next (part) etc. .

In a simplified world, we can used the bounding box of the loop instead. This works OK for rectangular shapes, but a circle next to an “L” shape could be seen as inside the L’s bounding box, hence inside the L, wrongly accused of being a hole, not a part.

Now all that is left to do is to create a new loop, offset by the tool radius. Oh, and since we have the connections from line segment to line segment in the correct order already, we can use the opportunity to order all cutting loops from inner to outer, or from small to large, and order non-loop edges by travel distance.

The new drawing in the new layer can now be exported without further hassle to create a nice laser cut file.

PS: of course, a user could create multiple layers for marking, cutting, enraging, etc. . Additional Layer attributes for cutting speed and laser power (and a few more) would be needed.

For example, I have a large drawing with lots and lots of entities on various layers and I want to select some entities (say 500 or more) which are all on different layers and change all these selected entities to match the properties of one other particular entity - but, but I want the ‘Matched’ entities to remain on their own layers.

OK, of course I can use the property editor for this and this is fine in most instances but I would first need to determine the the layer data for the properties of the entity I would like to match to (Color, Line weight and Line type) in the first place and then I need to remember these attributes in order to change things in the property editor in order to change all of my selection to match!

As I say mostly the above procedure would be fine to use but for convenience it would be great to have a new tool to do all this for me and cut out a few steps in the process.

A new ‘Match’ properties tool procedure could be something like this:

1. Select Match properties tool.

2. Select all entities to be matched.

3. Select entity to match to.

4. Tick or leave un-ticked - move to same layer.

5. Complete process.

* Actually, while writing this I`ve just thought of another useful addition which could be added to the Info tool set, ‘Entity’ properties info!Example - click on Info > Entity Properties and click on the entity in question and then the properties are displayed without going to the layer data for this!Just an idea ;)

It would be nice to have the option for a “Short” Extension Line.This is often used in Architectural drawings.Yes, I know that I can explode a dimension and change it to that what I’m asking for - but that is really a Sisyphus task and destructs the function of a dynamic Dimension in QCAD.

Would it be possible to add a feature which turns selected text into solid fill hatched polylines?

That would make it possible to migrate the drawing from one computer system to another without having to worry whether the used font is installed on both systems, like when sending a drawing to a manufacturer for laser engraving.

Right now I can do it by hand, letter by letter, and that is a rather labour-intensive task.

For a normal drawing displaying it in all detail is a good thing and the performance of my quad-core system is more than adequate.

But I discovered (or rather experienced) that when putting a large collection of individual drawings of gears onto one big sheet (960 mm x 600 mm - preparation for laser cutting), the performance was so bad that I had to wait several seconds (>10 sec) for each step in the process of arranging all the parts on the layer.

Request: It would be a big help and performance booster if you could disable the detailed view of each part/layer and only draw a rectangle to visualize the outline of the part.

Please take this in consideration. Attached you find an example of how that could look like. (Actually when pasting a drawing from the clipboard you already do that.)

When working with the isometric grid (in any projection - Top, Right, Left) and drawing from ‘scratch’ as it were, without using the projection tools - I find myself using ‘Line from Angle’ the most.

It would be extreamly useful to be presented with two extra buttons when using this tool, a 30 degree button and a -30 degree button, this way I wouldn’t need to keep typing in the angle difference here.

For example I am often working on a draft and at the same time scribbling notes down on a separate piece of paper relating to the drawing I am working on, could be anything e.g. add a block,add a dimension etc. etc... all sorts of things to remind myself about - all related to a particular drawing.

Of course I could use any number of other programs for this but a simple dedicated tool inside QCAD (could be called the ‘QCAD scribbler ;)) would be much better, especially one that can save the notes to a particular file, then when I open up my drawing again - my notes are there too!